Abstract
During the 1970s I lived just off the East India Dock Road in Blackwall, East London, close to the huge, forbidding walls of the derelict dock basin. I would spend many hours imagining the events that occurred there centuries before. What tales of British imperialism could have been told by returning mariners, Lascar migrants, emigrating Londoners and local dockworkers that congregated there in that tryst of cruel commerce, exploitation and terrifying arrivant uncertainty?
Now, in 2017, a group of cross-cultural and diverse writers with East London connections – among them teachers, journalists, National Health Service workers, photographers and lawyers – calling themselves ‘The Brick Lane Circle’, have made such historical dreams take on reality in their extraordinary book, Untold Stories of the East India Company. They re-invent, re-live and re-inhabit the lives of those men and women of two continents whose lives were forged, defiled and frequently horrendously changed by the institution of colonial penetration into vast lands and precious cultures, which it saw as its own for the taking and raping. This is the literature of the historical memory and imagination, set down by non-professional and highly talented writers all working in jobs other than authorship, determined to understand their past and how it impacts upon the now-times and futures of all those living and struggling both in East London and the East of the subcontinent.
In ‘The Destruction of the Big Ship’, Muhammad Ahmed Ullah’s first work of fiction, he crosses identities and the forces of history to imagine the life and death determination of a British sea captain to preserve his wrecked vessel in Banten, a Javanese port and East India Company colonial settlement. In ‘Shahid’s Odyssey’, Ahmed Choudhury (an artist, photographer and actor), enters the lost lives of nineteenth-century Sylheti brothers, Shahid and Raja, in a Company tea plantation. It is a long, long way from Brick Lane and Blackwall as Shahid stares at the horizon: ‘The twilight sky looked as though it had been set ablaze: a yellow-orange hue contrasting with the purple-blue. The sun dipped and turned into a golden dome. Far away were the faint silhouetted outlines of the hilltops.’ Such beauty is counteracted by the brutality of criminal plantation managers and Company officials. Their mother Amina reminds her sons: ‘They are hungry entrepreneurs who will go to any length to monopolise their enterprises.’
In the story ‘The blue-eyed girl’, long-serving East London teacher Anita Harrington traces the story of Pavati, the outside child of an English barrister and a Calcutta maidservant. She sees her widowed mother’s ‘last journey through the fire, that would take her to her next life’, accompanied by her new English ‘mother’, the barrister’s wife, who returns to Blackheath, London, to open a Christian seminary and Pavati becomes ‘Mary’. Musalman Qualum’s protagonist is a Bengali merchant seaman known as ‘Lascar Rajoo’ in his story ‘Hustle and the Lascar Shuffle, Defying the Hands of Time’. In 1814 he manages to gain employment as a very junior administrator in the new Company ship, Broxbornebury. Qualum declares that ‘he loves his life, his skin-colour and his five times lesser-paid self’.
In her story ‘Checkmate’, Nina Duttaroy writes of the defeated life of Zafar, the last Mughal emperor of India, as his humiliation resonated in 1857. She describes the treachery of the British Major Hodson, who murders the emperor’s sons while promising them clemency. There is a powerful picture of colonial oppression in ex-barrister Radha D’Souza’s story ‘The Prophecy’. She writes movingly of the spirit of the Tamil stable boy ‘strung to a tree and skinned alive on suspicion of stealing a horse’. Vijayappa, a Company worker, tries to save the life of a wounded Englishman and is deeply affected by the spiritual teachings of Kali, ‘a scrawny timeless man who sat on his haunches with his head between his hands, staring into the void’. Kali predicts that the coming disaster to engulf India’s people will come from the agency of those who have tethered themselves to imperial companies, in a mystical prophecy of twentieth-century neoliberalism, eras later.
Through their collective commitment, finely written narratives and powers of imaginative empathy, ordinary people become authors of their own far-flung ancestors, griots of their personal and communal histories, yet simultaneously arbiters of their own years to come. This is an exemplary publication, a book of the past that becomes, through its own historical truths, a marker of the future.